First of all, when
we’re talking about a myth, we’re talking about a special
kind of word. You know, a myth isn’t a reason for something, it
is not a logical statement.

[Eugene illustrates
his talks using the reverse side of scrolls of wallpaper. Here he is
working through a scroll in order to find a point at which he can
begin to illustrate this talk.]

Khen Ratcliffe: We’re going the other
way.

We’re going the
other way….

Up? They must be up to
mischief tonight.

Here’s the word.
Let’s put one letter here to represent TH because it’s
really an aspirated ‘t’ so ……. it’s a
three letter word, a special kind of ‘t’ with a lisp on
it and if we read it this way, and remember that ‘y’
sound is equivalent to ‘u’ with an ‘ee’ sound
in it, it’s a bit like Tum. If we write Tum for myth, we can
discuss just what a myth is.

In the head we have
reasons, in the heart we have affections, in the Tum land we have
strange uprisings of energy that come from certain seed forces down
below. Those seed forces contain all the forms of the ancestors’
experience. So the mythos, which is one of the words for ‘word’,
means that which arises from the ancestral experience.

We can write ‘mythos’
here, and ‘logos’ at the top. And we have two words here
in Greek for ‘word’, one of them means ratio, rational
word, and the other one, the mythos is the word from the tummy land,
from the ancestors. Now it’s quite obvious that the word ‘time’
is involved here, and the root ‘mt’/‘tm’ is
the same root, remember the Greeks used to write both ways, as a man
ploughs, you could write that way and that way. And when you were
writing along the line, when you came to the end you just wrote back
along that line, and then along this line. And that was called
‘writing as one ploughs [boustrophedon]’. And
therefore you’d write ‘mt’ there and here ‘mt’,
and then when you took out a word from its context you wouldn’t
know which way it was written. So that, whether you wrote ‘tm’
or ‘mt’, you would have to translate it into its literal
value, before you could deal with it.

Now the ‘m’
means substance, in Latin that termination with the ‘um’
at the end, is used for substance, and the same in the Greek. And the
‘t’ is the form, cutting into the substance. The
substance is like female, Mary, and this ‘t’ is like
Thomas the male. So the ‘myth’ is the resultant of the
processes of the substance and the form positor.

Whereas in the head we
have reasons, in the seeds we have the fruits of the genealogical
tree, the experience of the ancestors, coming up in the form,
apparently of irrational stories. Now it’s very important to
understand what we mean by irrational here.

If we make a statement
logical we have to make a statement of exact equivalence. For
instance, a basis in logic is A = A, and Not A = Not A. And between
the A and Not A there is no middle. Those are the three basic laws of
logic, the law of identity here, is the basic one and the law of
contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle. A thing must
either be A or Not A, and between being A, and Not being A, there is
no middle. And those are the rules of the logical mind.

But the mythical mind
says a thing can both be and not be, simultaneously. A being can be
reasonable and not reasonable at the same time. We know that in fact
this is so, because certain parts of us can behave rationally while
other parts are behaving irrationally. So that if we say there is
only one man there, then we could say that man is and is not
rational, simultaneously — because he may be in a towering rage
and at the same time reciting reasons why he should be in a rage. And
the rage part is irrational and the reason parts are rational.

So in the land of
mythology, the story doesn’t have to be logical in this
Aristotelian sense. If we, say, take an apple as an example –
here is an apple – if we get a knife and cut it – is it a
cut apple? Or is it not an apple any more, is it just two halves of
apple? If we get a table and cut the legs off, is it a table with
short legs as we’ve cut it? Is it still a table when we cut the
legs shorter still until they’re only one hundred thou’
of an inch high? Is it a table with very short legs? If we rub them
down with sandpaper until they’re level with the other part,
the top of the table, does it cease to be a table?

All this requires you
to change the name when you change the function. If we cut the apple
into a thousand bits and then ask ourselves, is it still an apple in
a thousand bits? Or is it a thousand bits? It was an apple.
Now according to logic, we must say at a certain point, it’s
time to stop calling it an apple. If I get an apple and grate it to a
fine grater, is it still an apple when it’s on the plate? Or is
it called grated apple? And these things are very important for logic
and all the disagreements in philosophy arise from failing to change
the term when you change the function.

If we say we use the
term apple only if it is not cut, then after we cut it in half it is
no longer an apple. And consequently if we eat one of the parts we’re
not eating an apple at all. So if we try to eat an apple logically,
the first bite will destroy it. And after the first bite, the second
one wouldn’t be apple. So in the logical sense we have to be
very careful.

But in the mythical
sense we could say it is an apple, when it is whole and when a worm
has bitten a hole in it, and when the whole of the apple and the hole
in the apple cause a difference of function. And we affirm all these
and say, I have now eaten the apple and the apple is now in me, I
have assimilated apple and therefore I am an apple being — this
is mythical thought. In this way we are not tied down to this
Aristotelian logic, with simple ‘A is A’.

Now in fact the whole
universe is such a structure that if you tried to apply the simple
Aristotelian logic to it, you get into continuous difficulties.
Because one being may have many functions and therefore for every
function it should have a name. We say of a being born from a human
being, it is human. If it has a certain sexual stress we’ll
call it a boy, if it has another one we’ll call it a girl.
Sometimes beings are born which are stressed so much in both ways
that you couldn’t legitimately call them either, so you have to
call them both. And at that point the Aristotelian logic would fall
down, because the human being is not either a man or a woman. It is
both, with a stress on one or the other. And when you say this, you
are finding a link factor between the logos and the mythos.

Now there are ways of
thinking which are not crudely rational, like the Aristotelian logic
is, and these ways of thinking which will be called by a mere
Aristotelian logician irrational, are tremendously important because
they allow us to put together things which ordinary logic would want
to keep apart. Thus, in ordinary logic the science of biology and the
science of chemistry are kept apart, but in life they are not kept
apart, and consequently the merely logical mind is at a loss how to
deal with what he would call borderline cases. And if we cut the
universe into categories, the real beings that exist have a foot in
more categories than one. Thus a man is an air breathing animal as
well as being a rational being, and so on, and he may have so many
feet in so many camps that your definition of him falls down at
certain points.

Now
in the picture you’ve just seen there is a mythical mode of
presentation. There are certain animals there and there are certain
human beings with animal heads and they represent certain ideas,
which ideas are better expressed in the mythical mode than with the
Aristotelian logic. But we are going to remind ourselves that all
opposites are fundamentally identical, and therefore the myth is
fundamentally logical, and all logic is mythical. We have to remember
that in order to resolve this problem.

Now
there’s a goddess here called the goddess of justice. Now her
name is Ma’at1.
And the root ‘ma’ – an ordinary philologist would
say is the root ‘to measure’. Whence the word ‘man’
comes from. The ‘m’ is substance and the ‘a’
is the activity of that substance. Now by means of the activity of a
substance we can count the substance. If the substance had no
activity whatever, it would be unaccountable because when substance
acts it weighs itself, and if we want to count we have to count the
weighed, because they give us the natural measure.

Now the ‘t’
at the end here signifies the fixation, the establishment. So this
concept of judgement is the concept of the fixing of the activities
of substance. We can remember a diagram we’ve discussed once
before of identification. If we can get a wave the crests of which
are coincident with another wave, we can say the two waves are
identical. That one isn’t, we’ll have to collect it a
little [a reference to his drawing of waves on the white paper].
Where they are exactly coincident, we can say they are identical, we
can say the ‘dent’ in identity means tooth, and each one
of those teeth corresponds with another tooth, like those in the top
jaw correspond with those of the lower jaw.

So when we are talking
about identification we take a form in the mind and another form in
the world, and if they correspond exactly, we can say the idea of the
form corresponds with that form. The idea of being object in the
material world corresponds with that object.

Now justice is here
represented as a woman, that’s ‘ma’ and as a man,
that is the fixation, the establishment [‘t’]. So that in
the concept of Ma’at we have already something represented as a
woman which is hermaphroditic. Namely it is a Will being, an appetite
being and a form being. It has the will to judge and yet the
judgement is essentially formal. We have to weigh. In weighing we
have to count, we cannot count unless there is form. So this apparent
goddess is really an androgyne, a male/female with a stress on the
female. It is a will to form. If the form were to dominate over the
will, then we would say it was a male hermaphrodite, but if the will
dominates over the form we call it a female hermaphrodite.

And Ma’at is
represented as Questis, and that ‘t’ already represents
the principle of the bound. If we just hang on this being the scales
on which we’re going to rest whatever we want to weigh, a
gentleman’s heart and a feather here, then the letter ‘t’
already represents this principle of balance. If we put a hand on it
we get the crux ansata and we have a portable scale.

Ma’at
is the very principle of substantial activity measuring itself, and
this, properly understood, means that you are your own executioner,
as a mystic once said in a popular film. The statement made by that
mystic, ‘I am my own executioner’ means that he knew that
the substantial activities of his own being were responsible in their
activities for the crucifixion of that being. Every time you open
your mouth you put your foot in it, means every time you formulate
you have to take the consequences of the formulation. So that this
concept of justice really means that you are, with your own
substance, activating yourself into a situation, and you will have to
pay the price of your own activities of your own substance.

Now the most important
part about this weighing of the soul is the fact that a feather is
placed opposite to the heart of the man. The heart is the feeling
centre, the very middle of your feeling, the part where you cannot
deceive yourself. All de-ception implies a cutting from this centre.
Deep down inside yourself, in the very middle of yourself, if you
dare to look at it, you know your own motive. And that motive is
called the heart, the heart of a man is his deepest motive.

Now in the Greek word
for mind, phren, we have a word that meant to the Greeks the
chest, the lungs and the heart, everything in the chest region, the
diaphragm, because they said, what goes on in your head is mechanical
because it is logical, what goes on down below is a prime urge, and
only what goes on in between is your business, and it is in this
middle part here where you say ‘yes’ and ‘no’,
that your centre of judgement is. And so to them, judgement was very
simply, I like it or I don’t like it. And it was in this region
of the chest.

Now we are frequently
told that judgement is in the head, but the kind of judgement that’s
in the head is the judgement of elementary arithmetic. If I say ‘1
equals 1’ and call that a judgement, I am merely making a
statement of equivalence. But if I now know ‘1 = 1 what’
then I immediately have an emotional attitude towards it. From the
moment I prefer ‘1’ to be equal to ‘1’ or
prefer it not to be, I am in the feeling department, and my heart
then, my centre of feeling is most important.

Now when we come to
balance things in a chemical balance, we have to put the chemical
balance inside a special box so there’s no air movement, and
mount it on special shock absorbing cushions and so on, so the
lorries outside don’t tip the balance, and in a very, very fine
chemical balance the sensitivity is very, very great. So much so,
that an earthquake in far Japan can upset your measurements in
England by tilting the scale. Now the idea of an exceptionally
sensitive balance is represented in this picture by the use of the
feather. There’s also a feather on the top in one of these
pictures, to show that the bearing of that being is well oiled, that
is, isn’t frictive, that the instrument of weighing is not
going to interfere with the things to be judged. So it means
impartiality, very fine, this. Now if it is to exist at all, it must
press in some degree. And the thing to represent the least pressure
here is a feather.

Now when the man is
looking inside himself, at his deepest feelings to see what he likes
and what he doesn’t like, if he looks very carelessly in a
hurry, he may judge wrongly. He may see a sudden impulse and say, ‘I
like that’, without examination, or ‘I dislike it’,
without examination, and when he allows that he’s not using the
feather. The ideal, symbolised in this feather opposition is, so to
refine your feeling that you could actually feel the pressure of that
feather if it were laid upon your heart. Supposing you put yourself
down on the bed in the dark and a friend puts a feather on a piece of
cotton over you and lets it down about one thousandth of an inch
every half hour, and you have to be so sensitive that you know when
that feather touches you. And that kind of sensitivity is signified
by this feather/heart operation. If you haven’t got it, you
will make mistakes.

Now we’ve said
before that the letter Aleph signifies the highest vibration and the
highest intelligence, the highest sensitivity. And immediately below
it is the universal. That one is absolute sensitivity and immediately
below it is the ‘He’ [pronounced hay] value of the
universal sensitivity. If we want to become absolutely conscious we
must become more and more sensitive in the feeling. It is no good
trying to do it by being sensitive in the logical department only,
because that is merely a matter of external formal equivalence.

Remember that when your
eye registers a message — there’s an eye looking at a
triangle, and that triangle goes in the back of the eye and meets
another and carries a message, and it is engrammed on the brain, that
picture of the triangle — if that triangle corresponds with the
one outside exactly, that kind of equivalence is the one that we
would call the equivalent of the rational mind, basing its
conclusions on empirical data. And that itself is not very, very
sensitive compared with the feeling centre properly educated.

You think, if I hold
this thing up, if your eyes are not suffering from various disorders
known to opticians, you will see one piece of chalk. If you see two,
there is something the matter with your eyesight. There is one. Now
if your eye is in proper condition, what you see there is one thing.
But you only see the thing, you don’t feel it
with your eyes. A light goes and hits you on the back of the eye and
stimulates a certain portion of the sensitive portion of the eye and
covers a certain amount of that retina with light stimulation, and
then you derive from it an image. And when, by repeated checking with
your finger running round the edge, you find it feels like you think
it looks, and you say there is correspondence between the two.

But that kind of
sensitivity is very, very crude compared with the kind we want,
that’s right down here, that’s the kind called Qof. Above
it we have Khaf, and then we have Het, and all these are different
levels of sensitivity, and when you actually touch a thing with your
finger like that, that is a coarse level.

When you look into your
mind and see the image of the thing that has been reflected onto the
eye, then that is in the Qof, intellective sensitivity. When you feel
the will to power in yourself as an individual, that is Het. And when
you feel the universal value of it, and that is the ‘He’
value, and when you feel the absolute value of it, you have
transcended all the other levels and you’ve gone beyond even
the universal level of sensitivity. In order to do so, you have to
become sensitive to a feather. And I mean this even physically.

Obviously if you can’t
make yourself sensitive to the weight of a feather on your hand, you
will not be able to make yourself sensitive to the beat in the
atmosphere when some person in the room has got a jitter in the solar
plexus. When somebody’s feeling really jittery, if you are very
sensitive and you sit next to them — that’s for beginners
— you will feel yourself getting on edge, and that is
sensitivity towards the condition of that man, who is himself
disturbed, and the energy field of his body is vibrating and if you
feel very carefully, you will discover that the energy field of your
body is vibrating likewise. This is the basis of all mediumship, the
increase of sensitivity.

So the feather here
symbolises that super-sensitivity and it belongs to a bird of the air
and the air word signifies, as you know in Latin, spiritus,
and the pneuma of the Greeks, signifies spirit. It isn’t
simply the stuff that you hit with your hand and feel, that is very,
very crude compared with the sensitivity you have to have in order to
feel, not you hitting the air, but the air hitting you. Because when
you’re in a room with what you would call still air, no
draughts, the air is pulsing all the time. And if you bother to try
to feel it, and keep very still you will actually feel that you’re
being patted by this stuff. It is actually going round your body. The
heat of your body is causing it to move. And if you feel very
carefully you will feel it tapping on you. And you’ll feel that
it’s tapping with different vigour on different parts of your
body, because your body has got different temperatures. But even that
physical sensitivity to the air tapping you is not the one signified
by this feather. It’s only near to it.

So if we say that the
feather symbolises the spirit, and we take the spirit as equivalent
to this Aleph transcendent power, intelligence power, then we can
understand the meaning in this picture that man’s heart is
being judged by putting a feather against it. Because very often the
course of a man’s life is made by a decision which he doesn’t
know he’s made. For instance, he may be in business, or he may
meet somebody in the street and start talking about one subject. And
while he’s very busy concentrating on the external material
situation, he may see out of the corner of his eye something go by,
and at that moment he may think that’s nice, and not even know
that he has seen it. And nevertheless, in saying, ‘that’s
nice’, he has forged a link in his nervous system, has made a
line of least resistance, called the next nervous impulse.

It’s actually a
very good method of selling even material commodities to certain
gentlemen, by setting up such things to go by. And if they go by, the
eye looks at them and thinks, that’s nice. And then half an
hour later you show him a picture of that thing and say, I’m
having dinner with this thing – would you care to come? And the
previous message has already biased him to follow it. And so he goes.
I’m telling you now about a trick that is actually practised by
certain salesmen I know, who deal with very, very large firms and
large amounts of staff, where they actually used this kind of device,
it’s sub threshold trickery really, long before sub threshold
became known popularly, namely giving a stimulus out of the corner of
the eye. And knowing a peculiar fact about the human eye, which has
only lately been discovered, that the periphery of the eye, the
corner of your eye if you like to call it so, can actually detect
movement better than the centre of the eye. The centre of your eye
can see a still thing better than a moving thing. But the edge of
your eye can see a moving thing better than a still thing.

And the reason for this
is very simple. In the self preservation need of a being, dependant
on the eye, the thing that moves on the edge must be detectable —
which means that we have a very, very special nervous pattern on the
edge of the eye which is connected more directly with self
preservation instincts than the centre of the eye. So if we want to
touch the primitive part of a person, instead of the conscious part,
we are better to show it on the corner of the eye. Whereupon it
catches the primitive part of him without the logical part knowing
he’s been caught.

Now it is this
primitive part that we’re talking about now which is really
more sensitive to the wider issues than the part down here
correspondent to the material activities, say, of an intellectual or
a man with an individual will to power. So when we consider this
function of the goddess Ma’at and the relation of it with the
feather, we are saying that a man’s substance by its own
activities is crucifying itself. It is measuring itself, and bringing
upon itself its own destiny, its own fate. Now the difference between
fate and destiny generally may be stated that: destiny is where you
are going to from within, and fate is what happens to you from
without. But fate and destiny are like the obverse and reverse of a
coin. If you weren’t going somewhere from within, nothing could
happen to you from without, because it’s the going from within
that exposes you in definite situations.

This phren word
which means mind gives you the clue, we have this phe
letter which signifies already to divide and the ‘r’
which signifies further differentiation, and the ‘n’
which signifies the continuance of that. So the phren means
that consciousness which is continuously dividing and
differentiating, the n means continuously. So continuously
differentiating by division is the significance of phren and
it is in the feeling department that that occurs.

The proof of it is very
simple because if I set down a series of elementary equations, like
1=1 and so on, you look at them, and if they are pure mathematical
they do not disturb you much, but nevertheless if you feel very
carefully you will find that you either like it or you don’t.
Look at 1=1 and ask yourself if you like it. Try to feel very
carefully. Do you like it? Some people have a bias towards
arithmetic, towards mathematical studies, some people have a bias
against it. Some people don’t want to know that 1=1, they
actually feel repelled by it.

As a matter of fact if
we pursue this to the length of study in metaphysics and say 1=1 and
therefore anything except a monism is untrue, there is only 1 being,
there will arise inside the individuated centres of you a definite
dislike of it. There will be an organic dislike because if all things
were 1 only, and not many in relation producing a synthetic unity,
then it would be splurge, it would go back to a mass of substance
with no differentiation in it at all.

Now look very carefully
at the equation 1=1 and ask yourself if you feel happy with it. Do
you feel a sense of security that 1is 1?

I don’t get it.

You don’t get it?

It’s incomplete.

You feel complete?

‘Incomplete.’

Incomplete? What would
complete it? You feel nothing and you feel that it’s
incomplete. Now if you refine your feeling you must feel something
about it, because you cannot have an idea without a correspondent
feeling, because an idea is a precipitate within a field. And the
awareness of that field is feeling. To use consciousness is feelings.
And an idea is a precipitate of a field and therefore whenever
there’s an idea, there’s a feeling state, if you’re
sensitive enough to see it.

Now, let’s change
these two 1s. And we’ll say the name of one is Negro and the
name of one is White Man, and let’s say that Negro = White Man.
Now have a look at it and ask yourself how you feel about it.
There are a lot of people in the country that would feel awful about
it and some people would feel pleased about it and so on. How d’you
feel about it? That’s 1 and that’s 1, that’s 1
Negro and that’s 1 White Man. What have we added to the idea of
simple unity, and what feeling has arisen from it? Can you detect a
feeling difference?

If we change the word
Negro to Hindu and put = Chinese [Hindu = Chinese], is the
feeling equivalent when you look at Negro = White Man, and Hindu =
Chinese? Now what’s the difference?

One brings it very
close to home, doesn’t it?

The important thing is
that you’re identified with this one and that identification
puts you on guard a little. It’s in your root of
self-preservation there, and what you are trying to preserve is an
idea, a concept of yourself, you’re a white man who was brought
up to believe it. A lot of history has been told you, some of it
rubbishy and some of it true, that Negroes are black men and black
men a short time ago made a lot of money for Liverpool by being
slaves. Now that kind of emotional knowledge is underneath your
general awareness, and it conditions you.

So when we look at this
feather, we can see that it means in evaluating your own heart you
must be so sensitive that you can feel the difference between a
Negro, and for those who are old enough, a Negra, called Polack. You
see? They both meant the same thing, black, only the Pola Negri2
meant quite black. She’s a sort of contradiction in terms and
she had a great deal of popularity because she had a funny name that
brought this into contact with this without a stigma. At least
without much stigma.

Now very, very often
you’ll find that the ‘not strange’ has no selling
value, and if you put a little bit of the ‘strange’ in
it, but not too much, its selling value goes up. It’s probable
that in the popular sense, the Negro version of the opera Carmen had
a greater popular effect than the ordinary version of it would have
had with an eighteen stone soprano in it, with a white ??????

We have to see the
emotional values of these words because these words are forms and
every form you have is conditioning your destiny and your fate. The
things seen out of the corner of your eye are like the things felt
vaguely about those words, and you have to turn onto that which
caught at the periphery of your eye the full force of your logic to
find out why it caught you. What is it? And yet you know that the
centre of your eye tends to react to the static better than to the
moving. It tends to pin it, and in so doing to falsify it —
because really there is nothing static in the universe. So when the
intellect selects something and establishes it, and pretends it is a
static form, it is really telling lies.

In fact the law - the
word ‘law’ is from the verb ‘to lay’ - and
that which is laid down, is a lie. And the word ‘law’ and
‘lie’ and ‘lay’ are all from the same root,
because the moment you put something down and say, that is fixed,
you’ve told an absolute lie, because the essential qualities of
the Absolute are dynamic. There is no possibility of applying a
static concept in the Absolute. The idea of static is the idea of two
forces in opposition, pinning something for a time. So all those
beings that look for security in any formulated concept whatever, are
really looking for security in something that doesn’t exist —
namely a static.

Now the more exercise
you do on testing your feeling reaction to words and to anything you
see in people – you look at somebody who has a pale face and
somebody else a warmer face, and somebody else square face, and a
round face — try to find out your reaction in feeling to it.
And then when you are feeling very, very finely — because an
idea is the centre of a field — if you feel very, very finely
you will be able to define accurately what you’re feeling. Now
this is judging yourself with a feather. And remember it is Ma’at
who is conducting this operation, that is it is your own substance,
with its internal activities which is establishing definitions. And
every established definition that you have is going to hit back at
the substance and commit you to some situation.

Now before we go any
further with the rest of these strange characters, is it quite clear
what we are supposed to do in order to increase this feather-brain
sensitivity of ours?

We are concerned with
our own substance, and we have to increase its sensitivity so that we
can detect in that substance the very finest movements, which if we
don’t alter them, will go in a definite direction, gain
momentum, mass and inertia, and eventually be so packed that they
cannot be diverted by all the efforts of the conscious mind. There
are a million likings and dislikings under everything that you
experience, and those tend to form alliances between each other, and
create a great army, until eventually you have a disposition, a
position which dis-integrates you. It takes you out of your true
substantial condition, your original, and commits you into a finite
situation.

There’s the eye
and here’s the point looking at you, and the edge of it is
sensitive to moving things and the centre of it to static things.
We’ll put an Andrew cross on it for the moving ones and a
George cross for the static ones. And all the moving ones here are
very hard to see with the middle part. And that middle part is like
your conscious, logical mind. And the rest of it, the edge of it, is
like the so-called unconscious mind, which is nevertheless reacting
to things on the perimeter of consciousness.

Try to see that —
if you can find out what you feel about a single letter as opposed to
another letter — that you are dealing in sensitivity, because
the only things you think with are forms. You cannot think without a
form, and you cannot judge a form without liking it or disliking it.
I’ll put down a vertical line. Look at it and see if you like
it. I’ll put down another one. Look at that. See if you can
feel this one and this one. Do they feel different to you? What does
this one feel like? Better. Well, we know that when that feels
better, it’s a sign that we’re still suffering from a
‘flat earth’ concept.

Because if we like to
draw the globe here and say that’s a mast sticking out and the
moon is over here, and the first up that mast gets a lollipop as a
reward, the feeling might change.

Nevertheless, the fact
is that for all general purposes the vertical gives us a better
feeling than this [horizontal], and the reason is association.
When we are vertical we are generally awake. When we are horizontal
we are generally asleep or otherwise engaged and therefore off guard.
So the important thing to see is that there’s an insecurity in
lying down. You don’t fight, at least in war time, at your
best, simply lying down. And you can, when you are vertical, give a
better account of yourself. This [vertical] feels dignified,
this [horizontal] doesn’t. Now if we put both
together we have another kind of feeling. And the feeling that we get
is not simply the feeling of the vertical and the feeling of the
horizontal, it’s the feeling of something else besides, over
and above that.

Now some people think
that a number is simply the sum total of those internal numbers that
compose it: that 6 is simply a row of 1s, and that it has nothing
over and above six 1s in it. But we are saying here that any relation
causes the emergence of something quite different from the parts in
isolation. So we don’t simply take verticality and
horizontality, and dignity and lack of it, we put them together and
say, vertical/horizontal, dignified and passive, active/passive,
positive/negative.

We also see here a
right-angle, here a right-angle, here a right-angle and there’s
something going on inside here — a sort of arrowhead vector
quality that emerges and forces the eye onto the intersection point.
So that we’re actually becoming more sensitive to the
significance of that cross when we can see this arrowhead here, and
the right-angle, and the fact that we are literally forced by this
openness here, and this gradual narrowing, to gaze at the
intersection point. Why is it that every time we make two lines cross
each other, the eye goes to the intersection point? Why does it do
it? It doesn’t matter what the angle we cross them at, it
always goes there. Why does it do it? The answer is that there’s
an arrowhead there and in there, and that from the wide,
progressively it narrows the attention.

Now there’s an
old mystical statement, every spirit seeks a body. We are bodies and
we have been sought and found by spirit. And spirit is infinite,
therefore we cannot define it. But the approach to it must be from
the point of view of any existent being, the material being, an
expansion — going wider and wider and wider and wider. And the
return to that body must be a narrowing of the attention.

So in actual fact when
we find ourselves looking at the intersection point we are really
under the influence of this fact that spirit is seeking a body; that
the infinite is in process of pre-ferring — which is rationally
making an objectification of its own capacities — so an
infinite potential becomes a finite actual. Now we have to feel these
things in order to be able evaluate our own inner motive. Simply to
do the drawing of the weighing of the heart by means of a feather and
think it is mythic and it’s what the Egyptians used to believe,
and possibly to do, wouldn’t help us. But if we know that it is
in the centre of our heart — in the centre of our preference,
our liking and disliking — that we are actually creating slight
baises in the substance, that we are actually making in the nervous
system resistances in the synapses, electrical resistances that will
make it difficult to think in a certain direction, and very, very
probable that we will think in another direction. So out of these
millions of little likes and dislikes we are conditioning our own
substance to respond to a stimulus in a definite manner. So that the
fate of the soul, the fate of the owner of that feeling, is
determined by the increase of sensitivity.

Now, Osiris is
mentioned here on the left of the scale, and Osiris himself, if you
remember, was cut to pieces — you’ll find references of
this being cut to pieces in other mythologies, you can ……….
and other people — and you will find that being cut to pieces
as a reference to this process, the Ma’at, the whole substance,
is being cut – there’s your letter ‘M’ - and
the Osirian body is the whole universal body. But the motions of the
substance of it, continuously re-crossing, are apparently cutting it
into bits.

Now when the Osirian
body is cut to bits in this manner, we have the particularised mind.
And it has to be gathered together and made again into a unity, which
is done through the labours of Isis, the moon goddess, and Horus. Now
you remember that the moon symbolises the mind, as gathering together
all the scattered impulses which are the dismembered body of the
universe. And Horus signifies the hierarchical consciousness. You
cannot just gather them together like a democrat, and say they’re
all equally valid. If you do, you will have an infinite plane and
there will be nothing on that plane to tell you where you ought to
begin. Everything will be on the same level.

[picture]

So Horus, who is a hawk
headed god, signifies that high flying mind, that aspect that climbs
right up and surveys the whole thing from above. So you have the
concept then of a pyramid with an eye above it and the eye is
surveying the whole field. And the higher you go, the fewer. That is
to say, the percepts down here are many, like the stones in the lower
levels of the pyramid, and then they come into fewer general ideas,
fewer still, and then the supreme, universal idea. And all of those
are projections of the original eye [I] or conscious
intelligence which created the universe.

So the Osirian body is
the universe as seen particularly, as seen in bits by your five sense
organs, and the gathering together of it is by the mental process
actually to see the similarities in things, and to synthesise them,
on the plan that you have, when like a hawk you fly up into the eye
of the sun, which symbolises the will, into the heights of the will,
and look down on the whole world and all its contents, and see them
in terms of relative values. The moment you think of things in terms
of relative values, you are forced to set up a pyramid.

And in the same way
with your daily life, you can find some things that you could live
without easily, some things that you could live without with a bit of
difficulty, others with a lot of difficulty, and some that you
couldn’t live without at all, which we will call essentials.
Now if you can sort your life out into essentials and non essentials,
and make sure that you do the essentials first, then you will enjoy
the non-essentials better. But the usual process is to spend energy
in doing non-essentials and then feeling bad because you haven’t
attended to essentials.

The reason for it is
perfectly simply. A sense stimulus from outside disturbs the organism
and causes a reaction, it cuts your unity into bits – that’s
your individual Osirian body being cut to bits by stimuli. And this
continuous tendency to react back from the stimulus is the same
thing, in the pyramid diagram, as going down to the lowest level. The
lowest level is like the perimeter of your being. And the highest
level, where the eye is in the centre, the true self-consciousness,
is the highest being.

So the non-essentials
of your life are arranged round your deep heart. You know that the
sign of Leo goes in there, from the Zodiac, which has to do with your
deepest will. And your will is always for or against something. So to
understand your deepest will is to have the possibility of sorting
your life out, and pushing to the perimeter those things that should
be on the perimeter, and retaining in the centre those things which
should be in the centre. This is the opposite of what happens in
ordinary daily life. The external things of the world crowd in and
worry people, they keep them awake at night, they actually have that
power, because of the power of the stimulus, to disturb and perturb
the mind — and the essentials are continuously knocked out by
the non essentials.

So if we set up the
idea of a pyramid as a hierarchy, a system of values of relative
importance, and than translate that pyramid round and build six of
the ???ears and build our circle again out of it with its six parts,
with the eye as central to it, and we have to consider the five
senses and their stimuli, the messages they bring us, in terms of
their essential or non-essential values. There are certain sounds
that are not essential to us, like the sound of a dripping tap in the
night. They’re not essential but they have a power to disturb
if you identify with them. There are certain perfumes, there are
certain tastes, touches and so on, and you should go through all your
five senses, and with your sixth common sense, the sensitivity common
to the other five, you should be able to integrate them and
understand what is essential and what not. What belongs to your
deepest will, and what does not.

And the rule is quite
simple. All you have to do is increase your sensitivity and never
look for more than ‘I like it and I don’t like it’.
There’s no question here of complications, because ‘I
like it and I don’t like it’ is a primary polarity. The
first manifestation of the Absolute into ‘this - not this’,
is the same as ‘I like it – I don’t like it’.
So you can’t get any deeper than, ‘I like it and I don’t
like it’. So you needn’t look for any mysteries beyond,
‘I like it and I don’t like it’. There aren’t
any. If you try to find beyond ‘I like it and don’t like
it’, in Boehme’s [Jacob Boehme] words you will
become ……….., you will become twisted literally,
because the energies in your body as you search out, always curl back
and try to objectify themselves. Because they don’t want, they
don’t wish, they don’t desire something, unless they like
it. And what is not likeable must be pushed away, must be disliked.

So in the balancing
with the feather we are concerned with the centre of the heart, and
it is this feeling and not any other that can sort out all the bodies
you have, and this is tremendously important to realise that you
cannot do it by thinking without feeling. If you take the
Encyclopaedia Britannica and its various rivals, and read them all,
like a little boy called the Hamptonshire Wonder once did, if you
don’t feel about it you will have no judgement about it. You
will just look at it and you will have absorbed form, like a girl
studying English literature in the university does, and it will not
help you in any way to lead your life, or to create any destiny.

Now there are some
other figures in this picture. If you want to study the significance
of each one you would have to read the behaviour of each animal in
the country where the myth is formulated. And I’ll take two of
the most obvious ones again. The Horus head, the falcon head, is that
aspect of consciousness which flies up away from the gross material
world. And there is another figure there with the head of a jackal,
and the jackal barks in the morning when the sun comes up, he’s
like the cock-a-doodle-doo of that part of the world. And therefore
he means ‘wake up’, he’s the waker. Actually the
English name ‘Barker’ is derived from that same source,
the barker was the herald or hermetic figure, who went before the
king and shouted out, here is the illimitable light of the universe.
Because you know monarchs always had very high titles, like ‘most
splendiferous son of the super universe’. And they had a man
running ahead of them, called the barker, the herald, whose sole
function was to shout out the peculiar virtues of his king.

So when we look at the
eye of Horus, that hawk eye, and we look at the jackal down here who
is busy barking away, he is shouting out the virtues of the man with
the eye of Horus. What we find about these Egyptian kings, and about
kings in other countries, that the high flying birds — the
hawk, the eagles and so on — were sacred to royalty, and they
were associated with the solar disc, and the kings of the ancient
world claimed to be from the sun; they were sons of the sun. And
because of that they were able to rule on the earth, because they
could see more than other people. They had a high mind, and they
meant literally a mind that could go up a mountain – there’s
a mountain and there’s two valleys, the man could go up there,
and could look into this valley and look into this valley.

He can then study the
behaviour of two peoples, and then if he wants to, he could rule
those two peoples, because he knows the aberrations of these people,
and the aberrations of these people. These two peoples have
got faults — every individual has faults. If this gentleman,
having climbed up the mountain, and who therefore evidences a high
mind, studies the peculiar faults of these two valley cultures, he
can then go back to either of them, and he can say, the people in the
next valley are ready for trouble; we must prepare to resist them.
And because he has come down the mountain, and told them about it,
their fear, which they must have of the unknown, causes them to
integrate round him and say, ‘what next’?

Now very often we find
in mythology references to sacred mountains, where common people are
not allowed to go up. You can easily see that the man with a high
mind who can gain an advantage by having a high mind of a mountain,
will make that part of the mountain taboo to the populace. So that we
find in ancient times people actually terrified of the spirits of
high mountains, and the priests’ telling them, you mustn’t
go up there, the gods live up there, and if you go up there, there is
death. Now the gods, if we trace them back, we find historically
refer to human beings with the high mind. They are called gods even
in the Bible. Even Christ calls them gods. He says, when he is
accused of making himself like God, is it not written ye are gods?

[break in
transmission]

….. or whatever
was inimical to health. And in another place, another valley where
there was a desert and no water, you do not find the right of
baptism, but you find something else. So if you import a man from the
desert into this place and he sees people washing in that which he
personally never uses except to drink, he will be very surprised and
think they’re wasteful. And if you take some of these people
and put them over here where nobody washes, they will think they’re
dirty. Some peoples wash themselves in coconut butter, and keep
themselves nice and shiny with it. It’s very nice, it glistens.
But the differences in these cultures enable the man who knows all
about them all to rule. So the eye of Horus enables him to set up a
scale of relative values.

Now we know that one
people who we’ll call loosely, the Jews, [1:03:43] have
travelled a lot in different countries and they have gathered
together in their dispersion, information about all the different
philosophical systems of the world, and they have set those systems
of ideas one above the other and made themselves a hierarchy of
values. And by means of that hierarchy of values they hope to rule
the world. And if they, and they alone, were to have those ideas,
they would rule the world. Christ refers to this when he tells them
they have had the Light, this is the eye of Horus again, and they
have not used it, and therefore it will be given out to the Gentiles,
and that Light will begin to lift them up.

So that we see
historically that from the moment the truth of individual freedom was
taught, and freedom from tribal dominion occurs with Christianity,
then people who were previously down here began to lift themselves
up, and they were taught that there was an individual value, a value
inside themselves as individuals, independent of the tribe or the
nation or the state. And being so taught they lifted themselves up,
and then they looked across and saw the other men with the high
minds, and they realised that a high mind can be secured by anybody
with the necessary energy. And from that moment comes the great clash
of all the high minded people.

Those beings down here
who don’t want to be high minded and don’t want to know,
stay down there and they’re the Proles of a certain recent
novel [George Orwell’s 1984:in which the Proletariat are so
labelled], and those who wish to climb up have understood
something of the doctrine, and therefore, in so far as they can rise
at all, they are justified. The justification, the balance –
justice is balance – is always in the achievement. The man who
gets so high is justified, the man who gets so high is
justified. The justification is the balance that you attain in your
own substance with your own form. Sometimes theologians debate this
question of, what is the meaning of justification in the Bible?

Now justification means
balance, and the being who can balance himself is justified. If he
does it by and from his own inner centre, he is self justified. We
will see later on that to be self justified is the same thing as to
be Absolutely justified. Meanwhile we have to see that this question
of merit and justification has to do with attainment, with energy
level, with how much you put into a stimulus situation, and how much
you are prepared to take out of an existing tradition. All success in
the world at whatever level is nothing except the expression of
energy finding a proper form. Nothing else can be done. You have
substance, form. And that form is a force which is applied to that
substance. Force into substance makes form. The force you have is
your own willpower, and therefore you have to decide what you like
and what you don’t like.

And another symbol we
find on many headdresses is the symbol of the cobra, which is made a
headdress in the Egyptian one, and it is a hooded snake, and the
hooding of that snake signifies its protectiveness, although in fact
that snake spreads this out in order to frighten its enemies, which
is to symbolise that the king is prepared to frighten the enemies of
his people. So it’s protectiveness. Whether we see it in
Egyptian headdress or in the Indian sculptures, it means the same
thing. The serpent signifies the free thinker, the man who is free
and who is able to pent himself, to hold himself in, to contain
himself and who hangs on the Absolute, not on the particular.

‘Ser’ is
the same as the root from which we get serrated, tooth. And the free
is this, that the waves lifting themselves up from the body of the
ocean free themselves from mass inertia. So when you break your mass
inertia, you become aware of ideas that you didn’t previously
have. Now this tells you that ideas grow in action. You cannot by
sitting still on a plinth somewhere – that’s how the
Anchorites in the early Christian days become omniscient. You can
learn something about the effects on the pelvic bones of continuous
sitting, but you can’t learn about some other things.

Every action teaches
you something, and some other things it won’t teach you.
Because the action is form, and what you have learned is no more than
form. It is the mass inertia of your own substance which has to be
broken, and then you’ll be ‘ser’. As a title, Sir,
the Knight, is exactly the same word — it means he who has
broken his mass inertia, and now has teeth to fight with. ‘Pent’
means think, ‘hang’ and hold in, so the ser-pent means
the free, self controlled being. Really it’s a reflexive
self-conscious being and we can then see why one of the oldest
symbols that we’ve ever seen in prehistory of God is a serpent,
that is, a free, reflexive being.

The cobra as the
hooded, spreading out serpent, is that free being who has undertaken
to rule and to protect. And quite obviously if he is ruling and
protecting, he must either be working for himself or a bigger
serpent. So if we complete the serpent with his hood, and some other
serpents with their hoods, we will build our three fold wheel with
Shem Ham and Japheth. And the supreme serpent is the one with the big
hood that’s a sphere, that is, the universal being itself, the
Ishvara of the Hindus.

When we consider a
symbol of this order we are actually calling upon ancestral images,
upon mythic content. Now all the mythic content lies inside the germ
plasm in our bodies — which means that the more mythical your
consciousness, the more you know about these myths, the more you feel
about them, the more in contact with genetic forces you are. And
these genetic forces are those which will confer upon you all the
understanding of your ancestral line. And as each one of us has a
different line from the original being of the universe, so each one
of us has a special genius or generative force. To be a genius all
you have to do is find in your heart centre the force that is trying
to generate, and when it does generate without opposition, without
resistance from the mass inertia of your body, then you are a genius.

So if we take the
original substance of the universe with the differentiating factors,
which split out and go along different lines, we then see that the
generative force, seeking expression, is the genius of that line.
Then you can understand why every family has a genius and you can
understand the meaning of your name, your sire’s name, the
being from which you derive, the original free being that broke away
from the mass inertia and thus deserved the name ‘sire’,
or free being. That sire is trying to gain expression through you. If
you discover the peculiar genius of a generative force of your own
line embedded in your name, then you can work freely, that is,
cutting away non essentials along your own family line. Every family
has a definite function. That function is seeking expression. It’s
continuously contradicted by other families. But if you find it, you
are finding your self, your meaning and your proper destiny.

So you can understand
then the meaning of genius of a race, the genius of a tribe, of a
family, of an individual within the family, because there is always
continuous splitting off. The implications of the original genius or
generative idea force, are that something can be done in an ever
widening environ, more and more diverse, but always from the same
genius, from the same generative force. And the man who tries to go
against his own genius will be at war with himself and with all the
genetic forces inside himself, and he will become sick. He will
disintegrate, because he cannot in fact defeat the genius of his line
without defeating himself, because he is the end, the terminal point.

And we know that when a
tree is growing, if you cut off the tip of it, then it cannot grow.
If you keep cutting the tip off, the whole branch cannot grow. If the
twig gets a bud on it and you cut it off, it can’t grow. So the
meaning of the individual human being is the same as a bud on a tree.
If you cut off the individual human being, you cut off the means
whereby the genius of the race was seeking expression. So if you cut
off any part of that function which that genius is trying to
propagate, in the same way it cannot grow, and where it is not
growing it is beginning to disintegrate. You must do either one or
the other. Because wherever the genius, the spirit trying to seek
expression, cannot get expression, it will turn away and try to find
an expression elsewhere.

So if you allow the
inner genius inside yourself to be blocked by your education or by
forces from outside, it will turn away and seek expression elsewhere.
If you cut it down completely so that it cannot express itself at all
outside, it will turn in on the body and begin to cut the body in
bits. This is one of the chief causes of physical degeneration, where
the thwarted genius turns on the body and that energy begins to break
the body up. You see, in expression, in action, there is health, and
in the inhibition of that expression is the root of disease.

Now you see here a
strange thing. He who is able to control himself freely is one of
these serpent kings, a divine being. But he who has himself pent up
by external stimuli is going to die. To control yourself freely,
because the time is not yet right, or because you have a scale of
values and some you would rather fulfil than the others, is right.
But to allow yourself to be restrained from outside, by social and
other considerations, so that your inner genius, which is pressing
through from your ancestors seeking expression is choked, is to
commit suicide.

So when we are
measuring ourselves inside, when we are playing Ma’at and
putting a feather against our heart, we have to ask ourselves, what
is our genius? What peculiar force is trying to express itself
through this line? In Zen there’s a nice little question, one
of the koans, which says, what was your original face before you were
born? Now the original face before you were born is simply that
absolute potential of the genius from which you derive. It is a
formal possibility which must press through a line – go down
here with an offshoot, a direction, a legitimate implication, a
legitimate development of the original genius.

If you turn back to
find your original face and climb back along your ancestors you will
find in the universal configuration of forces in eternity a form,
which reflected into the time process, you represent. In eternity in
the original universal configuration, that particular form is your
original face. And when you call upon that original face, and dare to
allow it to express itself in the time process, then you are genius.
And if you allow that expression to be inhibited by external
considerations, you will choke your genius.

So you see this old
concept that we find say in Plato, er … Socrates had a genius
which spoke to him. He says of his genius, he never spoke
except to say, No. Now that is to be understood in this way. Socrates
knew his original face, he knew what Socrates meant, he was ‘Soc’
and ‘Rates’, you’ve got a ‘saviour’ of
‘reason’. And you can see why Socrates was the greatest
dialectician, the greatest arguefier that the western world has
known. He was eternally a saviour of reason, he was a force committed
to save reason.

So when he appeared in
the time process and looked round at the world to see things,
whatever he tested himself for movement towards or away from, if he
started to move towards something and that thing did not correspond
with part of the meaning of Socrates in his original face, then it
shouted down to him, No! That left him absolutely free to do any of
the myriads of things that were legitimate expressions of Socrates.
But it shouted down, No! if he started moving towards something that
was not an expression of his original face.

Now in exactly the same
way, inside the body of every human being there is a feeling centre,
from which continuously wells up this feeling force, which is the
true genius. You can never know what it is unless you move on it. You
can’t know beforehand, and this is the meaning of faith. In
faith, you commit yourself before you know. If you won’t commit
yourself before you know, you won’t know anything. Because it
is only in action that the form of the situation becomes manifest.

So to find out your
potential, you must commit yourself into actuality. This actually
means — if we’ve got a very brave man here we might do it
tonight — this actually means that if somebody stands up in the
middle of the room, feels in his body and turns slowly in the room,
and looks at all the people in the room, he will find in his body a
definite inclination, towards or away from every other person in the
room. Now if you don’t actually have the nerve to do it, you
cannot find out. If you do have the nerve to do it, and blow the
consequences, then you will find out that inside your physical body
there is an absolutely infallible feeling.

Now have we got a nice
brave fellow, who will dare to do it? Will you dare to do
that?

‘ Ahuh.’

Now this will be an
interesting experiment from the point of view of the man who does it.
Can you stand up here? Just stand in the middle and feel with your
body with a slight sway like this, just sway, and I want you to feel
when you’re swaying, do I want to turn to the right or the
left, or stay where I am? And then look at each person and do it
separately to each person.

‘Like this?’

You don’t have to
tell them. All you have to do is feel. Just watch what happens inside
you, because we can’t say that you made a rational evaluation
of the character of everyone in the room already, can we?

‘No.’

And consequently what
you’re going to learn, this process, is going to be new to you,
and in the process you’ll discover that it feels quite right
and that you will say to yourself, if I had thought about it I would
have come to the same conclusions. So start with any person you like
and do this, and you must feel. You can’t do it unless the
body’s moving with it, the body must move because this movement
connects certain nervous impulses with the most primitive part of
ourselves. Try and feel when you go like this whether you’d
like to incline towards, or away from, or pass on. Look at each
person. While you’re looking at them, freely — you’ve
no need to tell anybody what’s happening inside you —
can you feel the kind of feeling I’m talking about?

‘Yes …..’

Yes. Now this feeling
is infallible. It has to do with your own genius, your own make up,
your own character fundamentally, and it is the basis of proper
diagnosis. It means if you do that on patients, you can pinpoint
particular things in them.

Let’s try it on
the other people. Now while we’re doing it, we’ll all
just retune …………. While we are doing it
on you, you will try and feel our attitudes towards you. You don’t
have to say what they are.

‘And we’ll be honest.’

What have you got out
of that? When you think about it, does it feel to you that as you
think, your thinking is correspondent with your feeling? And if you
worked it out by thought, you’d come to the same conclusion.

‘I think you would eventually, yes.’

Mmmm. Well, thanks for
the demonstration. …………………………..
If this is realised, that the body is very, very wise. Nietzsche, who
felt this very, very strongly called it the body wisdom. And he meant
that the body itself is very, very old. The egg which became your
physical body, the one you’ve got now, is of tremendous age. It
isn’t 30, or 40, or whatever ………, that egg
which developed into your present physical body is so old that it is
actually as old as the universe itself. The formal content of that
egg which became you, existed in eternity as an original form —
called your original face.

Which means, if you are
aware of the feeling bias in your body towards other things, the
yes/no in the body itself, you will be able to draw on all the
judgements your ancestral genius has ever made. And when you can do
that, it’s exactly as if a twig were able to draw on the sap
out of the branch, and the branch out of the trunk, and the trunk out
of the roots. It’s exactly the same. And the twig that thought
it was new and wanted to cut itself off from the branch to exhibit
its independence would be just like a modern boy cutting off from his
parents, grandparents and the human race in general.

The thing to realise is
that the physical body is not the body of a few years old, it is an
egg which has developed, and its present existence is evidence that
something from a colossal past has survived up to now. And therefore
myriads of judgements of the ancestors are in your body now. You have
a yardstick in the body, and this can only be known when you expose
the body to a situation fearlessly. If you fear, you inhibit. If you
expose yourself to the situation, as Dr Lawrence [Peter Cushing in
The Ghoul: 1975?] very bravely did, then you feel something
coming up and this feeling you must trust absolutely, because if you
distrust it you will interfere with it. It is illogical to distrust
it, because if you distrust it you kill it. And if you trusted it, if
it was no good it would manifest its no-good-ness by producing
nothing. But if you distrust it, you inhibit it, and you could never
find out if was good or bad.

So the precondition of
calling upon this inner genius, this which is resident in the heart
which is being evaluated with the feather, is to increase the
sensitivity, and the only way this can be done is in action. And the
only way it can be done for an existential human being is by moving
the physical body, and feeling inside the physical body little
inclinations, little tendencies in different parts of the body, and
in the body as a whole. The body is very, very ancient. The forms in
the body, hidden in the germ plasm, are tremendously ancient. They go
right beyond time into eternity, and they are seeking expression now
in every one of us.

To find that particular
form which we legitimately are, that which was implied in the
original face, and is now at the point of expression, is to find the
meaning of one’s life, to understand one’s destiny, and
to be able to avoid unpleasant fates, and to move into that fate that
was worth having.

Is that fairly clear
now? You must do it with the physical body and you must move the
physical body, and feel when you incline towards a person whether you
like so to incline. If you are in doubt, take a little movement
towards him and see whether the body tends to continue it. When you
get a total reaction towards a person, then take a little bit of
them, because you might find that a particular being repels you in
some measure, and yet if you take a portion of that being, it
doesn’t, because each individual has many ancestors, and
therefore has many original faces, one to each ancestral line
backwards. And yet there is one particular original face which is to
be expressed by that being in that particular time and place.

Now have we any
questions from that?

When you talk about this feeling/sensitivity, I
have difficulty myself in being able to decide what is emotional flux
inside myself, and what is feeling/sensitivity. In other words I feel
that sometimes I’ve reacted when it could quite possibly have
been a feeling about something.

Well, let’s
consider very carefully. Emotion is an outward motion of the
feeling.

Yes.

Feeling is field
consciousness. When you identify with any given centre, as you would
normally identify with your physical body as a centre, then any
motion that you feel in the field, which starts in that centre and
moves out, is an emotion. So an emotion is felt as a movement from a
particular centre, and it’s in relation to that centre that it
is called an emotion. Now the question to be determined is this: does
that emotion arise from your own centre without an external stimulus
provoking it, or is it simply a reaction to an external stimulus? If
it is a mere reaction to an external stimulus, not coming from your
centre, then it isn’t what you have to cultivate. But if you
feel, you will know immediately.

[picture]

Let’s take it,
there’s three concentric circles here, a stimulus comes from
outside and it has a certain wavelength, a certain frequency, a
certain degree of coarseness. Consequently it can only penetrate so
far into that being and it can only produce a reaction there at the
level of that fundamental. Supposing we say that that stimulus is of
a definite wavelength, and we say that wavelength is its fundamental.
Then the greatest disturbance will only go up to that limit, and
there’s the physical body. Now a fine motion inside here also
occurs, and its appropriate reaction, and the fine motion inside here
is thinking. And this is still motion of the stimulus, but it is not
felt as a tendency of the physical body to do something immediately
about it, but an idea arises in there, much weaker, from the point of
view of the individual.

And in it is made the
judgement, if this stimulus were to come again very often I would
move away from it, or if it came very often, I will move towards it.
But there’s no actual physical movement to that stimulus. But
inside here in the centre is your will. There’s an idea, and
there’s your body reaction, and there’s your will. Now
this stimulus can never gain power over this centre unless that
centre identifies with the idea or the body.

Remember, we said when
a motion goes in, it cannot go to the dead centre, it would block the
whole thing. So it wheels out again and leaves a hole in the middle.
And that hole is the kingdom of heaven. That hole is free will, and
nothing can constrain that. When people are brainwashed with stupid
tricks, attacks on the body, a person of reflexive self conscious
will cannot be made to change his mind, because in a real sense he’s
not identified with it, and he wouldn’t consider he had one.
He’d be quite content to be a reflexive self conscious free
will.

So the stimulus from
outside acting on the body can produce a body reaction like a knee
jerk, or a shadow of a body reaction, called an idea, but it cannot
determine what the will does with it, because it never penetrates
that far. But the will has the capacity because the will is the
precipitation of the field, the initiation of motion in the field, it
can spread itself out in its awareness, and it can become aware of
ideas and aware of the body. And when it does so habitually, as being
aware of the body, then any stimulus coming to the body, the will
reacts to it as if it were a body. It doesn’t have to but it
does do because it is identified. You can see the danger of
identification from this, that when the will, the consciousness, the
‘I’, says to itself, I am that body, or, I am that idea,
it immediately places itself under the law of body reaction or under
the idea reaction, the so-called logical relation. The will itself is
beyond logic and beyond body activity, and it can identify with the
idea or the body, and if it does identify it will come under the law
governing either the idea, or the body, or both.

So we see the
tremendous importance of what we’ve always said here, about the
force coming in and not being able to go to the dead centre.
Identification means the fittingness of forms, biting with the top
teeth on the bottom, and so on. If that will deliberately spends
itself out, then when the stimulus comes and the body reacts and is
felt, it will say, I am reacting. If the after motion of it,
the finer motion called the idea, is identified with, it will say, I
am thinking. And if another motion comes in and says that you’re
thinking rubbish, it will defend itself, because it has identified
itself.

But if instead of
saying, I am the body, or, I am the idea, it says, there is a
body, and, there is an idea — the body by its very
necessity must react to a stimulus and the idea must react to a
stimulus, but will is free — then it sees the reactions of the
body and idea, or body and mind, without itself involving itself in
them. And thus it remains free, even though those reactions occur.

Now the being who
attains this level, of being able to see the body reaction and the
mind reaction and yet not identifying with it, is called the
jivanmukta, the free in life, the man who has — although he’s
still got an individual body and mind — inner freedom from
them. So that at the dissolution of those things, he is not lost, he
is himself, he is reflexively, self consciously, a will. And because
he has no parts, he cannot be destroyed. And because he is not
identified he cannot panic when the body breaks or the mind becomes
schizophrenic. He refers always backwards onto the essential unity of
his will.

So in that case then, if in spite of the fact that
you might have emotion which you are still able to watch, that’s,
that’s quite all right.’

Oh yes. You recognise
that when the stimulus comes there’ll be a tendency for the
body to react back on it, and if it reaches into certain idea
complexes – remember each idea has ‘I like it’ and
‘I don’t like it’ attached to it – and so
what you would call an emotional flux having its original outside
yourself will be recognised as such, because in the state of non
identification you know as a fact, not as a theory, that you haven’t
initiated this yourself.

Now it’s quite
different when, say a young man who is having a row with his
girlfriend, she having run off up the road, he chases her and as soon
as she’s forgiven him, he decides he’ll run away too. And
so they spend their evening running away from each other and catching
up. And internally they feel that they are doing it on purpose, that
it’s not simply a product of an external stimulus, but that
they are initiating this funny behaviour from inside. You may watch
pigeons running round, you’ll see a hen pigeon running away and
she’ll run in a curve and the cock will be chasing her and if
he’s not careful she will be running round him because they’re
going in a circle. Then he has to turn round and go the other way.

Now that is coming from
their deep centre, from the pigeon genius which likes doing that kind
of game. And it manifests for its own function in certain periods.
When the will comes out to reproduce itself from inside, we know that
it comes out quite independently of an external stimulus, because if
you place that man in prison with no stimulus there, nevertheless
there will arise from his centre a certain tendency, and that
tendency is the tendency arising from the genius of the race from
which he springs, which is determined to make another twig, in other
words to work out another implication of the original idea.

But by sensitivity you
can tell whether the emotive flux is caused by an external stimulus,
or whether it comes from inside you. If it’s from outside you
ignore it and then it dies, because the energy of reaction is your
energy of will identifying, and when the will is withdrawn from
identification, the reaction ceases. If you withdraw it even a little
bit, the reaction tendency of the body or the mind immediately falls
down to a lower level. You’re not so easily provoked. And if
your non identification is perfected, then you cannot be provoked at
all. But this does not mean that you’re dead, it means that
whatever happens in future will come from you, from your own
generative centre, from your own genius, and not from the external
situation.

If provoked it would also be perturbed, you would
not be perturbed, would you? You wouldn’t be perturbed under
such stimulation, would you?

Well perturbation is
another word for provocation.

Mmmmm. Provoked into reaction or presentation.

If you consider the
turbulation that goes on in the substance, you would say, I am
perturbed. But if you consider the rational statement that you would
make about it, that’s provocation.

Mmmmm.

So perturbation
explaining itself is provocation.

You know what was
said once about ‘like’ and ‘alike’,
those feelings that you’ve been experimenting with tonight,
would they be the same? If ‘A’ stood there and felt
driven away from ‘B’ then would it absolutely follow that
if ‘B’ stood there he would withdraw from ‘A’.

If they were at the
same level of sensitivity, Yes.

I see.

Remember that a man is
a very complex being, some parts will repel and some parts would
attract at the same time, because we have many ancestors and there
are many intermarriages back, which bring us into continual
cross-cross relation. Nevertheless there’s something in us
that’s fundamentally opposed, otherwise we would not exist as
separate beings, and that opposition should be there. We
haven’t to try to conquer that opposition, we just accept
difference as such and make no apology for it, and we’re not
perturbed by it. It as an essential part of the fact that a tree
spreads its branches out, and when it makes a new branch or a new
twig, it doesn’t then feel guilty of leaving the parent trunk.
So the twigs don’t have to apologise, and we are all twigs off
one cosmic tree, so we don’t need to apologise for our
differences.

In the office I work in, most of the people stay
to have their lunch there and there’s a room set apart and
quite a pattern will form as to where people will sit.

Yes.

And it’s occasionally broken, but it’s
fairly consistent.

Mmmmm. When it is broken you’ll
find that some stimulus has broken it, it’s forced into
consciousness for the time being some other part of it.

Actually I’ve been trying to work it out on zodiacal
signs but I don’t know if ……

Very, very often you’ll find a
marked evidence of it. You’ll often find that like signs repel
each other.

I was going to ask that. The fact that you are repelled by
someone suggests a likeness.

Well, it’s a question of how many
……..

Is this the value of doing the exercise?

One of the values.

One of the values.

It has many, many values. That’s
one of them. It isn’t even the most important.

No.

The most important one is giving you an
absolute security, by making you aware of eternality in you, which
cannot be taken away from you by any means whatever, and therefore
you don’t need to defend it any more.

Mmmmm.

Because you’re only provoked to
defend that which may be taken away from you. And what may be taken
away from you cannot be yours. And you’re better without it.
Because what really belongs to us takes up all the room in us that we
have to spare, so we don’t really want anything that doesn’t
belong to us, because there’s no room for it.

The capture of the unicorn by the
virgin, is important in the myth there, the unicorn can only be
captured by a virgin. And if you get a virgin and put her down in the
forest a unicorn will come and put its head in her lap and then you
can tie it up. Unicorn is the unique power, the uni-fic power which
is only possible in absolutely pure motive, a motive unspotted by
external considerations. The twist on the horn of the unicorn and
that it’s made of mother-of-pearl tells you what it is. The
whole of your will has gathered itself together and twisted itself
into a unity and you’ve allowed no external consideration to
divert you, and that is only possible with the virgin will, that is
the will unspotted, unstimulated from outside itself. [*****]

That’s what the genius is doing.

Mmmmm. Just that.

All those that are not genuises are all those people that have
been diverted from their true path.

Yes of course. What everybody’s
chasing round for today is their true purpose. When they really ought
to be doing it.

Whereas if Boehme had been an educated man he would have been
less of a genius than he was.

Mmmmm. Hence William
Blake saying, Thank God I never was sent to school to be flog’d
into following the Style of a Fool. All external stimuli,
all education, can divert you. Remember that in Zen Buddhism today,
scientific education is forbidden, because it splits in bits, it’s
an intellectual analytical process which destroys the thing you are
looking for, the inner unity. It destroys all the possibility of that
by filling the body full of external stimuli.

[A second talk begins here on the
same IHS tape. May be better here to start a new tranny, Caroline?]

We have two educational problems here.
We might have a bit of discussion round them.

Do you consider that education could be speeded up

so that children’s mental development keeps
pace with their physical development?

Should they, for instance, spend four years

absorbing what could quite easily be absorbed in
half the time?

It’s a funny one tonight. The
second one related to it is:

Will the State, that is a hetman in control of the
State, make any efforts to

educate the public in universal principles in the
future?

Or will the evolution towards perfection

remain an individual or small group activity as it
is now?

These two questions are very closely
related. The hetmen controlling the State are not likely to make any
efforts to educate the public in universal principles in the
foreseeable future, certainly not for another thousand years, because
of the difficulty of doing so. It would be very, very nice if they
could educate the public in universal principles, but in fact
the public, if the term is properly used, are not interested in
universal principles. And one of the chief difficulties for State
controllers is trying to persuade the public to be bothered about
even general principles, quite apart from universal ones. So that we
can say that it isn’t likely that the State will educate the
public in universal principles in any foreseeable future, in the
sense implied in the question. And therefore we can expect, as far as
we are concerned, to act to work as individuals or in small groups.

Now the other question about the
education of children, could that education be speeded up so that
children’s mental development keeps pace with their physical
development? This is a rather funny question, because the physical
development of the child proceeds at a certain rate, and it would be
extremely difficult to show what kind of ideas should be present in a
child at a given age. How are you going to determine the relation
between mental development and physical development? Is to be
something to do with the growth of the child’s body, when the
body gets bigger and thus the ideas cover a bigger area, and if so,
what is the relation between the two? And how to state it, so that it
can actually be done?

The ‘for instance’ here,
would be even more difficult of application. Should they, for
instance, spend four years absorbing what could quite easily be
absorbed in half the time? This of course doesn’t state the
kind of subjects that can be absorbed in half of four years,
that is two years, and it doesn’t really go into the absorption
capacity of a growing child. One of the things that is certainly
dangerous, is to try to accelerate the development of any being
beyond the natural tempo of its own organism. If you cram information
into a child, verbal information, information gained by adults in
particular fields, you can in fact stop the child’s organic
development, stop its psychological and spiritual development by
equipping its mind with concepts which the child will then believe it
knows about.

Now if we know about a thing, or
believe we do, we don’t have to do much about it. So that if we
actually put into a child’s mind prematurely, concepts, we’ll
say extreme concepts, those universal principles and so on, without
practical physical application then all that would happen would be
that the child would have a series of terms which would not in any
way influence its action and the structure of its own being.

Let’s have a look at this idea,
should the mental development keep pace with the physical
development? There is an egg. In the egg there is a nucleus, and
coming through this nucleus there are forces from the ancestors
working out to develop the egg. What is the mental level of an egg
which is going to be a human being later?

We’ve said before, that before
the partition of the egg, the response of the egg prior to partition
is protopathic. When a stimulus hits it, it simply respond with a
ripple to it, it vibrates and responds to the stimulus, and the
content of consciousness, its mental level is then simply the level
of a being that is incapable of analysis. If we stimulate it
simultaneously from many different points, the stimuli from all these
different points will become confused. So that prior to the setting
up of specific organs inside the body, the protopathic level of
response says that information will be confused.

We can take this as the type of mental
level of the cells that are not in contact with the nerves connecting
it to certain coordinating centres of the brain. There are cells in
the body which respond protopathically and they are responding in
this very, very primitive level. Now when we get our first partition
in the body – I’m ignoring the nucleus for the moment to
simplify it – when we get the first partition and the stimulus
comes from one side, it is more or less confined to that half of the
organism. There’s a certain amount of vibration of the dividing
wall which transmits a pale image of the information to the other
side — but not sufficiently to orientate and force the body to
respond in terms of action.

So when we put one wall inside the egg,
then the mental level of this being has reached a first stage of
analytical actuality. It can now analyse in some degree. That is, by
means of this wall, it can have its whole mental content divided. Now
it has a very strong stimulus on one side and the wall is insulating
the being, so that the stimulus can’t pass through to the other
side with the same vigour. It’s now got a double mental
content, and one part of it is violently agitated by the stimulus and
tends to respond to it, and the other part has only a gentle
vibration, that transmitted by the wall itself to the other half. The
part that’s gently transmitted can see the form of the
situation, without having the imperative to respond to it. Now that
is the mental level of a being with one wall inside it.

Now when we put a being with more walls
than one inside it, two, one, then across, we divide the being again
and we confine the stimulus energy to a quarter of the being. If we
go on dividing and make that into many, many tiny parts, which is
what happens to us at this stage, then when a stimulus energy comes
into one part, it is confined to that part in its more intense
vibrations, and it vibrates the enclosing walls a little bit, and
there’s a shadow of the stimulus goes through the rest of it.

Now it’s obvious that the more
walls we put inside the egg, the greater freedom there is in the egg
from the necessity to react to the stimulus physically. So we can say
that the mental level of this being is rising as we’re putting
in the walls that divide it. Without the walls to divide it, we
cannot expect it to rise above the protopathic level of response. It
cannot choose until it is divided at least into two. And then when we
go on multiplying these divisions the amount of freedom from
stimulation grows in proportion with the number of the divisions. So
that when a stimulus comes and it’s confined to a very tiny
part, which we then call a cell — which is what it is, it’s
a little chamber or room — that stimulus cannot force the whole
being to respond to it.

That particular cell may take a very,
very strong stimulus, absorb it and reflect it from its walls and
actually itself perish and in that perishing of the cell, may be the
salvation of the rest. It is fitting that one man should die for
people3,
it is fitting that one cell should perish rather than the whole body
should perish. If you get a burn confined to a few cells in your
body, a warning goes from that group of burnt cells to the rest and
then they can run away from it without having to be burnt. If we put
an anaesthetic in here with a needle, you can burn it without a
warning going forth and then you may burn considerably greater
numbers of cells.

And we can see that freedom increases
with the partition of the body, and the mental level is going up with
this partition. You know that in Bible terms, somebody says that
Simeon and Levi slew a man to their own hurt by digging a wall4.
And this erecting of the barriers between us, this digging of the
wall by Simeon and Levi. Simeon and Levi mean emotion and perception,
the two ways of partition inside the body. Once this process of
dividing has started, straightaway two things have happened. You have
a perceptual division, the stimulus can inform a given cell, but you
also have the emotional response of that cell. The perceptual side of
it is symbolised in Levi and the emotional response in Simeon.

And yet this perception is going to cut
the body to bits, into separate percepts, and it is going to likewise
cut the body into little packets of emotion, of likings and
dislikings. Every little cell is a form and an emotional attitude.
Every stimulus a cell has received in any part at any time is charged
with liking and disliking. So you have the form of the stimulation
symbolised by Levi, the emotional charge symbolised by Simeon.

Now if it weren’t for another
process that goes on, the being would have all the little cells
isolated, sealed off, so that each little cell would receive a
stimulus and the other cells would be free from it. But they could
not coordinate their activities in a directional manner, unless they
laid down some coordinating processes.

And in the Bible symbology, these
coordinating processes are symbolised by Joseph. Joseph throws a vine
over the walls — the suggestion that we put a nerve connecting
the two parts of the being that have been split. And there’s a
nerve cell and it has grown in both directions and thus connected the
two halves of the split. Now the nervous system is a system of
insulation. It is not a means of communication, it is a means of non
communication with the parts you don’t want to communicate.

Let’s have a look. If we have the
protopathic state of the being, when the stimulus comes, the whole
being vibrates to the stimulus. If we part the being, then the
stimulus is confined in its most intense mode to one side, and the
other is relatively free. Now we have to connect this stimulated side
to the non stimulated side, and then we have a means whereby we can
filter energy in a definite direction down a nerve, and that nerve is
bound with insulating material.

Now in a certain stage in the growth of
the human being from the egg this insulating material is not properly
laid down, and then the reflexes in the human body are not those that
you see in an adult. When the system of insulation is completed, and
the body has been partitioned off and all the cells are separated
off, by means of this coordinator we can connect the information from
any group of cells to another group of cells, and cover the whole
body either immediately or mediately through the nerves. And the
nerves are little insulating systems, and you can imagine if you
like, like a tube, if you insert energy down one end of the tube, the
insulation stuff stops it spreading. So it can’t spread from
the whole organism and produce a protopathic reaction, it has to go
down and come out of the other end, and then makes the special
connection with certain cells, certain organic groups.

So that by means of the partition we
gain power of perception analysis, and emotional response to the
analysed situation, and by means of the nervous system and its
insulating devices we have a means of directing across these cells of
various patterns the information gained by particular cells. One cell
gets a stimulus and it responds and that’s very painful, and
from that there goes a nerve which carries the information of this
pain being experienced here, and from that one there may go another
one to a muscle, which says, well, we’d better run away. Now by
means of this system of division and communication, problems are
solved that could not be solved in any other way.

???????

Can we in fact put information into a child,

other than that which its physical level allows it
to do?

Well, we see that if we confine
ourselves to a simple egg and leave it to the protopathic level,
information is no more than the stimulus of that, and this response
is protopathic, so that whatever information we put inside it, is not
analysed out at all, and therefore not insulated. The mental level of
that being is that it knows the stimulus quality and form, but it
cannot separate it out from other stimulus forms and qualities, and
so the whole situation is confused. Now the mental level then is
about the lowest we can imagine for a finite being. But it contains
within itself the potentiality of unity, and later of integration. If
we did not have this protopathic background, which is really our
primary feeling background, we could never learn to integrate the
forms, the ideas, the patterns which stimulate the various emotions.

In that case we could never expect to
educate a child beyond the level of its physical body, because its
physical body would have no complexities. The information we put into
it would be that information, and the content of consciousness in
that being would simply be that, throughout its whole self. It would
be a unific being with confused information, and its physical level
would be the same thing as its mental level. Now how can it happen
that a being can have a physical level different from its mental
level? The answer can only be that in the process of division, one
part of it may have information which the other part is deficient in.
Then the whole being can be said to be deficient in information in
one part, and yet well-equipped in another part.

Now supposing we make this into a two
part being, and put the extra part on for the head, and the spine,
there’s a coordinator. Supposing we imagine this is a child,
and this child has got to be educated. It has ears on the side of its
head and it has eyes. We indicate certain propositions to it. A –
when we utter a sound A – the message from the eye goes in and
registers a shape. A message from ear goes in and registers a sound.
These two are registered on different cells, that’s the Simeon
and Levi division, but they’re coordinated also. That’s
the Joseph vine over it.

Now we can fire information in here
very, very quickly if we want, but unless that information goes down
into the body and is translated into physical action, the other
levels of the body will not be in correspondence with the mental
level. Now it’s quite easy to do this on a child, you can
recite algebraical equations to a child long before it knows how to
count up to ten. And if you persist in it, you can make a parrot
recite quite complex equations, and thus startle a professor of
mathematics, but it doesn’t mean that the parrot knows what
it’s doing. And in the same way it doesn’t mean that the
child knows what it’s doing.

It’s all the same whether you
tell a child it’s a genius — that is you utter the word
‘genius’ to a child — or teach her the alphabet. As
far as the child is concerned, they are equivalent. Initially, they
are quite meaningless. Later on, they’re going to be a source
of trouble. If you recite the word ‘genius’, ‘you
are a genius’ into the mind of a child without defining it, and
without putting the child through the physical discipline to make
sure that it is one, it will have a sentence inside it saying ‘I
am a genius’ and later on when it comes to read some books, it
will discover that a genius is a subject of great admiration in the
world. So that the protopathic logic will say, therefore everybody
worships me, therefore everybody should do as I say, therefore, etc.
And it will become central at the conceptual level.

Inside here there’ll be a whole
complex of ideas and yet in fact they’re quite meaningless.
That is they cannot be translated into action by that child. We can
stuff information, that is formal statements, into the brain of a
child, and yet the child will have no physical capacity to correspond
to. It’s no good saying to a child, born without legs, and
there are such children, that you are the champion world runner. If
you recite it, it will certainly recite it, and it will be reciting
mechanically. And later on it will think that somehow or other it is
a runner, and it will require to be treated like a world champion
runner, even though it’s got no legs. And this can easily
happen in other fields in less obvious cases. Any information that
you put into a child’s brain, and yet do not see that the child
carries this information into act, is so much poison.

That which is not put into action
through the organism is poison. It doesn’t matter how good the
concept is, if it is not news, it is so much energy non correspondent
with physical performance. And in that non correspondence, there’s
a strain between the parts of the organism that deal with action and
the other parts that deal with intellection. So if we try to educate
a child beyond the level at which its body can respond to the ideas,
we are really sowing the seeds of future trouble. In fact, the great
increase in schizophrenia and similar disorders today is no more than
an attempt to accelerate the mental content way beyond that of the
body actualising possibility.

Remember we have a three part being,
with a prime drive, emotions and thinker.

And the prime drive here is deriving
its energy directly from the food, and it is going to express itself
in muscular, physical movements, and if successful, in a pleasure
cycle, and if unsuccessful, thought will begin. Now, only that
thought which grows out of individual failure in a physical situation
is really valuable for that being. If you put information inside that
head and the child has had no physical experience of the
correspondence of that information, you have liberated a concept that
can only do it harm.

If we talk about being level, first of
all we have defined being as rotational force, and the being level in
our terms here is simply the level to which a being has been raised
by parting it, Simeon and Levi, and then coordinating the parts. Now
we can, if we like, make a numerical statement of values.

[Finishes at 08:04 in the MP3 titled
Education. There are 32:25 in this talk.]

2
Barbara Apollina Chalupiec (aka Pola Negri) was born in Janowa,
Poland. Her first role was in the film, DIE BESTIE in 1915. By the
time the war ended she had starred in the Polish production of SLAVE
OF SIN in 1918.